As a child, you might have been warned to not sit in certain positions for your own good.

One sitting position in particular, popular with the kids, has been a cause for concern among researchers for years. It’s called “W sitting,” “television sitting,” or “reverse tailor position” where your thighs are flat against the ground in front of you and your knees are bent, putting your ankles on either side of your butt.

The worry is that sitting like that will change the way your joints develop and make physical activity more difficult later on in life. And while there are conflicting findings, the general peer-reviewed consensus seems to be that you’ll probably grow out of any physical changes related to this sitting position. Unless your preference for sitting that way was all thanks to your genetics.

Here’s what data suggests about the real danger of W sitting. [ ♪ INTRO ] Over the years, researchers have published papers referring to W sitting as a position that can stretch out your ligaments and make you hypermobile if you sit like that for extended periods of time. The term hypermobile refers to your ability to flex parts of your body like your fingers, elbows, and knees beyond the average range of motion. You might have heard of it referred to as being double-jointed.

And yeah, it sounds cool to be able to move in ways that most people can’t, but it can come with a lot of pain and health problems too. This sitting position has also been associated with rotated leg and ankle bones, inturned toes, and flat feet, which some researchers say could make walking harder. So that’s where some of the concern comes from.

But before you enforce a new sitting regiment, let’s unpack those associations and get a more complete story. One worry is that these lower body rotations make movement harder later in life. But a study assessing adolescents and adults found no decrease in running skills among people who have turned in toes, also sometimes called pigeon toes, compared to people who don’t.

So it might not decrease your physical performance later in life. And that’s assuming that it even lasts that long. Several studies suggest that most people grow out of rotation, loose joints, and flat feet around 10 years old anyway.

So if you’re seeing it in children, it might just resolve itself. Now to address the overarching concern that a certain style of sitting will manifest in physical changes to your body. It’s pretty common for kids to sit like this.

One study of more than 1,000 preschool children found that 63.3% of them sat in the infamous W style. And of the entire study sample, only 5.9% of the kids had inturned toes. So that’s a much smaller group than those who sit W style.

But of the kids with inturned toes, 80.6% sat in the W position. So sitting in W position doesn’t mean you’ll develop inturned toes and other rotations because such a small portion of the people who sit that way also have those physical traits. But there are definitely more people with inturned toes sitting in W position than cross-legged.

Which leads us to the concept that people who are already rotated may be more comfortable sitting that way. If your legs or feet are positioned at different angles than other people, you might find different ways to sit that work with your body rather than trying to contort yourself into a position that some people find comfortable. And it’s the kind of thing that can naturally happen for people diagnosed with Hypermobility Spectrum Disorders including Joint Hypermobility and hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.

These are heritable disorders of the connective tissue, which is the stuff that helps you sense where your muscles and body parts are, aka proprioception. While they can be acquired from surgery or other traumatic events, some people are born with this predisposition to be hypermobile. In the 21st century, researchers have identified more than a dozen new genes related to Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and traced its inheritance through family lines.

Which means that sometimes you’re hypermobile regardless of how you sit. And honestly, sitting might be the least of your problems if you’re living with a Hypermobility Spectrum Disorder. When you’re super flexible, your self-awareness in space is thrown off, your soft tissue is fragile, and your muscles are weak, it’s like a perfect storm for injury.

You might experience fatigue, joint sprains, joint dislocation, and chronic pain. But not everybody diagnosed with a Hypermobility Spectrum Disorder is going to encounter all of these obstacles because we tend to lump together related diagnoses, and there are more than 20 different kinds of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome alone. And, like I said before, W sitting isn’t a life sentence to experience all of these symptoms.

Just because people with joint hypermobility are more likely to sit in this position doesn’t mean everyone who does is hypermobile. So the W in W sitting doesn’t necessarily need to stand for “worry.” Thanks for watching this episode of SciShow! If you know a child who enjoys sitting in front of a TV in absolutely any way, we have a great YouTube channel to recommend: SciShow Kids!

Our host Jessi and her friends at the Fort learn about weird creatures, study the stars, conduct experiments, and answer questions from viewers. It’s a fun introduction to science for kids in the early grades of elementary school! You can find it at youtube.com/scishowkids. [ ♪ OUTRO ]